Pages

Wednesday, May 9, 2018

I'm happy about this one, though I'm not sure whether it's actually doing anything new. The one bloom it's produced to date is similar to some of the other red/pink seedlings (e.g. 099B Karma Cobra or 103B Must Be Love). The seed parent is the NOID magenta, which makes me wonder whether the original batch of 114 seedlings from 'Caribbean Dancer' might have had multiple pollen parents: it wouldn't surprise me that much to learn that I'd tried to rub pollen from the NOID peach and NOID magenta on a flower from 'Caribbean Dancer.'

Even so, it's lovely, and considering that the seedling was less than two years old when it bloomed this December (sow date 23 April 2016; first bloom 8 December 2017), I expect it will produce a lot more flowers this fall.

Also: yes, it's been a while since the last post; yes, this is partly because of the secret project (which is going well); no, I'm not likely to begin posting regularly again anytime soon (because the project is not yet finished).

Eat Your Heart Out and Epicenter are both glancing references to the coloration: especially as the flower was first opening (above photo) and dying (below), the petals sort of seemed to make a red ring around a zone of pink, drawing attention to the center (ergo Eat Your Heart Out1) or resembling maps of areas affected by earthquakes (Epicenter2).

Franceska Mann was a Jewish ballerina in nazi Germany who, while being taken with a group of other Jewish women to a room next to a gas chamber and being ordered to strip, managed to distract the guard by stripping all sexy-like, steal his gun, shoot him fatally, and injure another SS officer.3 It's not, ultimately, a happy story, as Mann and all the other women were killed anyway, but, you know. It's happier than the stories where no nazis die.

And then, in a dramatic mood change, Love Is All Around, the title of the song that served as the theme for The Mary Tyler Moore show, which was previously considered for 167A East Of East St. Louis. I rejected it then because I wasn't sure I wanted to risk having a permanent MTM earworm, but it's a year later and I can think of a lot worse things than that, so maybe we should consider it anyway.

I'll let Epicenter go first; of the two names that reference the bullseye / red-ring effect in the photos, it's the less appropriate one. So that's pretty easy. And I can let go of Love Is All Around, I guess, both for the earworm concerns and because I find the remaining two names a lot more pleasing to me. But after that it gets really hard to choose one.

Franceska Mann is a way better story (since Eat Your Heart Out isn't a story at all); Eat Your Heart Out is really appropriate for a pretty seedling, whereas Franceska Mann doesn't necessarily have to be pretty. It doesn't hurt, obviously, but it's not required.

The detail that's going to decide it for me, I think, is that Eat Your Heart Out, taken literally, is pretty gross, and idiomatic English is a lot harder to understand for people who don't speak English. So this one is officially going to be 420A Franceska Mann.

-

1 ("Eat your heart out" is also used as an idiom for jealousy: if you tell someone to eat their heart out, the implication is that they are, or ought to be, very jealous of you. Which works well for a seedling that's prettier than average, making the name doubly appropriate.)2 (though depending on the type of quake and the configuration of the rocks involved, the actual epicenter -- the point on the surface directly above the origin of the earthquake -- is not necessarily the location which sees the most surface shaking or damage)3 Some of the details of the story are inconsistent depending on who's telling it (Snopes.com), but the central story of a Jewish ballerina named Franceska Mann stealing the gun of Josef Schillinger and killing him with it isn't disputed. (Well. Except by the sorts of people who dispute everything about the Holocaust, but we don't need to take them seriously.)

Hey there! Good to see you're still among the living, and your project is going well.

Another thought I had about the name is that she was a ballerina, and these flowers look so graceful to me. They almost look like dancers themselves before they fully open. Or maybe I'm just anthropomorphizing too much. ;)

Just so you know:

Infrequently Asked Questions

Have questions about PATSP? See the Infrequently Asked Questions post, or ask directly by e-mail. To e-mail, remove the two "d"s from the below address:

mrsubdjunctive@doutlook.com

Please note: I am a person, not a houseplant-care-advice vending machine. If you've asked a plant-care question and I responded, that took time and effort that I could have spent on something else, and it's nice if you acknowledge that with a "thank you."

Also: no, I will not help you draw attention to your Kickstarter. No, I do not need the services of a blog-ads optimizer. No, I'm not interested in promoting/reviewing/giving away your products. Fuck, no, I will not write for free for your blog. I know these things are important to you, and you feel that your case is so special that I would obviously make an exception to the rule if you asked me because of how special your thing is, but I assure you: it is not special, and I will not make an exception. (This means you, Mother Earth Living.)

Licensing

Photos on this blog attributed to mr_subjunctive are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License. All other photos retain the licensing preferences of their owners and require permission for reuse. Contact mr_subjunctive for help in locating the sources for other photos.
Text on this blog: all rights reserved. Text may not be duplicated by any means without permission of its author, who is actually pretty easygoing under most circumstances and will probably say okey-dokey if you ask to reproduce something (but you still have to ask, and credit mr_subjunctive as the author of the excerpted part).

Ass-covering legal disclaimer that should really be perfectly obvious to anybody reading this anyway

The thoughts, opinions, life choices, etc. discussed in this blog are those of its author, and are not necessarily endorsed by his former employer, nor were they ever necessarily endorsed by his former employer before she was former. In fact, I'm pretty sure we disagreed about a lot of stuff, which was additional incentive not to discuss anything that didn't relate pretty directly to plants. And as far as it goes, we disagreed about a fair amount of stuff directly relating to plants, too.

In any case. Nothing in this blog should be taken to represent my former employer's views on anything, except for the few things explicitly identified as her opinions, and even then it's possible I've misunderstood or exaggerated what her actual views were. So if you want to know what she thinks about stuff you should just ask her.